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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.religion,net.sci
Subject: Re: Hitler: Why we need a Science of Morality
Message-ID: <638@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 18-May-86 18:00:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.638
Posted: Sun May 18 18:00:40 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 20-May-86 06:45:28 EDT
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 33
Xref: linus net.philosophy:4962 net.religion:9843 net.sci:580


>From: tos@psc70.UUCP (Dr.Schlesinger)
>  It does make a lot of difference whether a reactor is an electric
>power plant or a military or research reactor. The Hanford plant,
>which is indeed of the latter variety, as well as several other
>American reactors which have some design similarity to the Chernobyl
>one, produces fissionable material. It runs at much lower capacity,
>involves far less heat, and has significantly less general production
>pressure associated with its operation. Hence there are a number of
>objective, empirically verifiable reasons to calculate the safety
>risks of such machines  at much lower levels...

So, therefore, you feel comfortable with the fact that Hanford operates
without a containment vessel even thought that was pointed out as being
the chief problem with Chernobyl?

How come lower capacity et al seem so important when it seems that our
major nuclear accidents are being attributed to "human failure"
(Chernobyl, TMI) by plant operators? Does the lower capacity
compensate for human failures? I presume somewhat (less likely to be
confronted with certain problems like bursting valves) but I think it
ventures into some very sticky new probabilities. At any rate,
certainly the lack of a contaiment vessel at Hanford (as at Chernobyl)
makes us more liable to the results of a human error and therefore
should be looked into carefully. I don't think the fact that it is a
military reactor is clearly relevant here, although it's not clearly
irrelevant either, probably a minor issue at best.

See, a logical problem, how does one weigh the facts (not, perhaps, as
a nuclear engineer, but as a citizen)? Obviously we disagree only on
weighting.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University